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Kenyon College Athletics

Lalasa Nagireddy
Marty Fuller
4
Kenyon College KENW (15-7)
5
Winner Sewanee SEW (18-7)
Kenyon College KENW
(15-7)
4
Final
5
Sewanee SEW
(18-7)
Winner

Match Recap: Women's Tennis |

Owls’ season ends in close contest with Tigers

SAINT LOUIS, Mo. -- In Friday's second round of the NCAA Division III Women's Tennis Championship, the No. 22-ranked Kenyon College Owls pushed No. 20 Sewanee to the edge. The Tigers, however, battled back from a 3-1 deficit to oust the Owls by a 5-4 final.

The win for the Tigers improved their record to 18-7 and put them into the tournament's quarterfinal round to face the host and No. 6-ranked Bears from Washington University in St. Louis. The loss ended Kenyon's season, as a team, with a record of 15-7.

Kicking off Friday's match, the doubles results were tight. At one point, all three doubles matches were tied at 5-5. At No. 3, Kenyon's pairing of Lalasa Nagireddy and Ana Brand pulled out of the tie with three straight games, defeating Nicole Nowak and Mariella Congeni, 8-5. Meanwhile at No. 1, Sewanee flipped the script and knotted things at 1-1 after Katherine Petty and Brooke Despriet delivered an 8-5 win against Kenyon's Eleni Lazaridou and Allaire Berl.

That left No. 2 doubles as the rubber match, deciding which team would gain the one-point team advantage heading into singles play. That advantage went to Kenyon, as the Owls tandem of Shadia Amado Aguad and Eleni Dakos held off Sewanee's Ansley Carpenter and Sarah Livingston, 8-6. Amado Aguad and Dakos took a 6-5 lead, but Sewanee answered to tie things up again at 6-6. The Kenyon duo then went on to take the last two games to claim the match and give Kenyon a 2-1 team edge.

In singles, Berl raced to a 6-0, 6-3 victory over Despriet in the No. 2 match. That pushed Kenyon ahead 3-1 on the team leaderboard and left the Owls needing just two points in the remaining five singles matches.

The next result to come in, however, was the No. 1 match, in which Petty rallied from one set down to upend Lazaridou 3-6, 6-2, 6-1. That pulled the Tigers within one point of the Owls and what followed was another Sewanee victory. The Tigers tied the team score at 3-3 when Livingston defeated Dakos 6-1, 7-5 in the No. 4 singles battle.

The Sewanee streak was finally halted by Nagireddy, who came back to win the No. 6 competition by a final score of 2-6, 6-4, 6-1 over Nowak. Not minutes later, though, Congeni tied up the team score again, this time at 4-4, after squeaking by Brand 7-6, 7-6 in the No. 5 match.

That left just the No. 3 match between Amado Aguad and Carpenter to decide it all. At the time of Congeni's win at No. 5, the score in the No. 3 match was squared at one set apiece and tied at 3-3 in the third set. From there, Carpenter moved ahead 4-3 and then 5-3 before Amado Aguad got it to 5-4. That would be as close as it would get, though. Carpenter got the last game, won 4-6, 7-5, 6-4 and kept her Sewanee team alive in tournament play.

Although the season came to a close for the Kenyon team, Lazaridou still remains in play as she'll return to Saint Louis as one of 32 players to compete in next week's NCAA Division III Singles Championship.
   
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